Dutch lawyers for the Mothers of Srebrenica survivors' group said they were suing the Netherlands over the decision for "granting absolute immunity to the United Nations".

World Bulletin / News Desk

Relatives of Bosnian Muslims massacred in the town of Srebrenica sued the Netherlands on Thursday at the European Court of Human Rights over a Dutch court ruling that said the United Nations had immunity from prosecution.

Some 8,000 Muslim boys and men were killed by Serb forces in July 1995 in an area protected by Dutch UN peacekeepers that the United Nations had declared a "safe haven".

Lawyers for the group had tried to sue the United Nations in the Netherlands for failing to stop the killing. But the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the United Nations could not be prosecuted by a national court, ending the effort to hold it to account for failing to prevent the genocide.

Dutch lawyers for the Mothers of Srebrenica survivors' group said they were suing the Netherlands over the decision for "granting absolute immunity to the United Nations".

"The denial of justice is even more horrendous because the United Nations is denying them all legal recourse," the Van Diepen-Van der Kroef law firm said in a statement.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg said it had received the complaint.

The slaughter of Muslims, judged an act of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, was the worst atrocity of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, in which about 100,000 people died.

Dutch U.N. peacekeepers were unable to prevent attacking Serb fighters from occupying Srebrenica, separating Bosnian Muslim men from women and taking them in buses to dozens of execution sites.

Last year, a Dutch court found the Dutch state responsible for the deaths of three victims, opening the way for compensation claims over the failed peacekeeping mission.

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